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How technology moves on...

Im sitting my local pub (bar) havin some food, posting on my nokia communicator... typing this message. Ahh, hasn't technology changed??_Who here, would have thought a little cellphone would be able to allow me to post this message?_

For years I was thinking to myself "soon, soon, very soon now" but now we're AT that point.. The future is now, and all those things that we kept hearing about in the late 80's and early 90's are finally reality. It is a fantastic time to be a geek.

All I want is a damned HoloSuite from Star Trek. I would then build my home from that, be able to design every feature of it, every aspect, but most of the time, it will be my play ground for the Virtual BattleField!

RWB said All I want is a damned HoloSuite from Star Trek. I would then build my home from that, be able to design every feature of it, every aspect, but most of the time, it will be my play ground for the Virtual BattleField!

Cheers to that!!! The first thing I would have is a jam session with Jimi Hendrix!

I have held off on the web phone, PDA and other new gizmoes. I want to be able to carry one device, OK make that two. A cell phone/PDA thing that mates with my notebook computer.

The problem with phone service in the US is that you can't get special services in 85% of the country and no one company can even give you basic phone service in every major city. One case where competition didn't bread a better situation yet.

I was just thinking the other night how amazing it is that I could be playing a game (Kid Icarus), that looks at least as good as something on GameCube, in glasses-free 3D on a handheld device that connects to the internet without wires. It really makes me starry-eyed when I stop and think about this stuff. "What would a 10 year old me think about this?"

That has been my dream since childhood! I always wanted George jetson's car.

But to think that what used to be just a phone:

* now takes as good pictures as the average pocket camera* is better than a lot of video cameras* is smarter than my old PDA ever thought of being* plays my favorite music as good as any mp3 player* and also gives me news, weather, stocks, radio, movies, TV and a gaggle of things I never thought of 9yrs ago when this post started!

Oh my gawd if 10 year old me could see 34 year old me, with the ability to play almost EVERY SINGLE MAGNAVOX ODYSSEY and FAIRCHILD VES GAME EVER MADE in a single device, 10 year old me would shit himself.

I think you guys are looking at this backwards; the younger we are the easier it is to take technology for granted. Ten year old versions of ourselves would pick up the device, say "oh cool" and just start using it to play games.

It's only 30-something versions of ourselves who see the past 20+ years of innovation and think it's revolutionary. Kids think it's normal. We're meta-thinking about the situation from today's viewpoint, rather than really seeing it how our ten year old selves would see it.

I was thinking about this the other day as I watched my 15-month old son pick up my Android phone, play with the touch screen as if he were dialing, then put it to his ear and say, "Hi!" to it.

As I witnessed this, at first I thought, "Wow, when I was a kid phones were gigantic chunks of plastic with physical dials and cords. By my definition, the Android's not even really a phone - how does he know to use it like that?" Then I realized the archetype for a device is relative, and kids will mimic the adult use of pretty much any item humans have conceived.

For adults, though, archetypes stick around longer than is relatively useful. For example, when we think of "phone" symbolically, it is often pictured as a sideways handset of the telephones we grew up with. It's increasingly not relevant when our actual telephone is basically a miniature tablet convergence device with a touchscreen face. Similarly, the "Save" icon of almost every piece of software out there is a stylized floppy disk. How long will that make sense to kids, many of whom have never used a PC with a floppy drive? Because these concepts hold such inertia in our adult brains, we think of our younger selves as rigidly encased in the technology of the era in which we grew up, but in reality our young selves would take to today's tech just as readily as today's kids.

I guess that's just a long way of saying, kids just intuitively use technology as intended without gawking, and without shitting themselves.

I actually had the conversation about the Save Icon with my students the other day. Most of them had no idea what a disk was.. It went something like this. Me-Click on the picture of the league Floppy Disc. Student-The what? Me-The picture of the thing you used to have to save stuff on. Student-You mean like my USB DriveMe- Yes, but it only held about 1/1000th as much data. Student - Wow, how did you get anything done?

Without exageration, this is what the first phone I picked up and said 'hello' looked like.

And since there were no cell phones, radio phones or anything of the kind yet these came in quite handy and were worth the nickel to make a call. (later on they upped the price to a dime)

In the 60's my sister "just had to have" one of these.

Oh yea, and there were no digital cameras, you had to shoot film, take it to the drug store and wait a week for the pictures.

TV was a novelty that was only black and white with nothing to watch but "old movies", news and stupid game shows.

Only rich people had movie cameras, that used film that had to be sent by mail to develop and took forever to get back. But you could speed up the process by sending it "Air Mail" and enclose a pre-stamped "Air Mail" envelope.

And only the government and universities had computers that took up whole rooms or buildings and now pale in comparison to todays handheld calculators!